Oracle Social Cloud (legacy) vs. Sprout Social

It's well suited if you are in a situation where you need control of the content that is published out to your channels. It provides complete trackability for every action taken by each member of staff when working with the system so you can always know who was overall responsible for any decision that was made. It's less suited to small businesses that have limited social media presence. It is very slow on being kept up to date with the native platform and the lack of ability to schedule the same post multiple times is frustrating

Incentivized

Sprout is well suited for a social media manager juggling a wide roster of clients. Sprout allows you to schedule weeks or even months' worth of social posts across all different platforms. It is extremely reliable for scheduling posts; I never have to worry if a post gets up the way I intended to get it up. It is also great for reporting key analytics to clients. I do wish there were more analytics at times, but for high-level data, it does the job.

Incentivized

• Ease of reporting. Allows us to pull reports by network or by campaign quickly. This used to be a manual process that would take upwards of 8 hours per month.
• Real-time social media monitoring, with virtually no spam. Other providers struggle to remove spam content from their social monitoring results which makes sifting through mentions cumbersome.
• Integration into other tools. Being able to integrate other Oracle products like Eloqua and web analytics like Omniture helps us see social media content as part of our larger pipeline now.

Incentivized

• The Landscape system that Sprout Social offers allows me to modify all the images that I want to publish on my social networks. This service allows me to modify the size of the image, add filters, modify the colors and much more, it is a very important tool to be able to have a better presentation of the images that we use in our publications on social networks.
• It offers me a perfect statistical system where I can consult all kinds of movements that have occurred in all my social networks, I can see statistics individually or generally. The statistics allow me to see group reports, participation, information on audience movement on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and also allow me to view the activity that has occurred in my account.
• Sprout Social allows me to view a record in real time that shows me all the movements that my social networks are having by my employees. As Director of the Marketing Sector, this is a very important role, as I can know what actions my employees are taking to improve marketing with social networks.

Incentivized

• Tabs tool could be much more user friendly, i.e. completely "drag and drop". It was pretty easy to get something functional built, but if you didn't know how to code CSS then you were pretty much hopeless when it came to making the tab look "professional".
• Their bulk uploading/scheduling feature for posts was always having issues, it was something I always wanted to take advantage of and was bummed that it didn't really work well enough to make it efficient.
• When I was using the tool, it was a very janky user experience when you needed to go and locate a post or comment that had been automatically removed due to keyword filters. And there was no simple way to just view a stream of what's being said on/to your accounts.

• Social media platforms don't always play nice with Sprout so it will always be a challenge to get all integrations to work properly.
• Sprout Social is a growing organization and they are acquiring new technologies, which can be good. However, they often spend time in meetings upselling new services. I like to learn about enhancements and opportunities but prefer to focus on my investments first.

Incentivized

Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.

I like Sprout for our needs and I like that it is easy to use. We want something better than HootSuite but don't need a high-level fancy program. The only think I don't like is customer service (except for chat).

Incentivized

Within a few hours you should be able to get up to speed to do the basics. I find it very intuitive

Incentivized

Sprout Social's ease of use and navigation throughout the technology are relatively easy to figure out and teach. We also had a representative thoroughly walk us through the features and functionality to set us up for success in using the platform. I didn’t give it a ten because there were times when the navigation didn’t make sense, but once you figured out the quirks, it didn’t cause any trouble.

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies

Incentivized

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely responsive. They're also always looking for suggestions on how they can make the product better and will actually take your ideas to their team to see if they're worth implementing. I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved by them in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

We started our social marketing journey by just using the free version of Hootsuite. It had good listening but was limited in other areas, especially as it related to campaign tracking and some analytics. Even looking at the Enterprise versions, we didn't feel it had the breadth of functionality as Oracle SRM.

Incentivized

When scouting different social media management platforms, Sprout Social stood out as the best choice despite other companies offering competitive features and lower rates. Some key factors solidified our decision to stay with Sprout Social. One major drawback we noticed with ione of the competitors was that their Advocacy extension operated under a completely different website name, making the experience kind of disjointed and confusing. Also, unlike Sprout Social’s 24-hour (or less) response time, another competitor’s customer service was based overseas, which limited our ability to resolve issues efficiently I assume. The combination of Sprout Social’s integration and support pretty much made it the clear winner for our needs.

Incentivized

• Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
• Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
• Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.

Incentivized

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized